The Life-Experience and the Philosophical Meanings: Defining .... Natasha Research...Journal of Historical Studies Vol. II, No.I (January-June 2016) 61 The Life-Experience and the

Journal of Historical Studies

Vol. II, No.I (January-June 2016)

61

The Life-Experience and the Philosophical

Meanings: Defining the Nomenclature of Simone

de Beauvoir’s Feministic Thought

Natasha Kiran

Abdul Rahim Afaki

University of Karachi

Abstract

The pivotal theme of Simone de Beauvoir’s magnum opus, Le Deuxième

Sexe (The Second Sex) is the idea that woman in relation to man has

positioned herself secondarily in the lifeworld as the Other of man since the

ancient times and further that this secondary position of women in the social

order is imposed by the force of the patriarchal atmosphere rather than the

feminine characteristics. Women’s being so defiant regarding womanhood

reflects that their sense of perpetual femininity is haunting to them and they

want to get rid of it; and this to Beauvoir is in no way an appropriate

attitude of women. In spite of this nominalistic abstractness she directs

herself to the existentialist transparency of meaning that in the facticity

every human being finds himself or herself a concrete existent always a

singular, separate individual. Drawing upon this existentialist notion she

defines the problem of feminism in the nexus of facticity whereby she further

expounds how woman being a for-itself (pour-soi) is necessarily related to

the in-itself (en-soi) – the world and its past. In this argumentation she

draws not only upon existentialism and feminism but also upon

phenomenology and Marxism. This paper interprets the details of this

argumentation by referring to these four different philosophical discourses

and so it attempts to define the appropriate nomenclature of her philosophy.

But throughout the argument of this paper the nexus remains a binary

relationship between the life-experience and the philosophical meanings

that is essential in the fold of phenomenology. The whole argument of this

paper remains bipartite: Part I defines the nomenclature of Simone de

Beauvoir’s philosophy in terms of the mutuality of the life-experience and

philosophical meanings by incorporating phenomenology, existentialism

and Marxism and then in Part II it refers to the same nexus of the life-

philosophy mutuality while defining the feminist traits of her thoughts.

Key Words: Existentialism, feminism, phenomenology, Marxism, life-

experience

Natasha Kiran &Abdul Rahim

62

Woman‟s situation of being the other of man is, according to

Beauvoir, a result of men‟s chauvinistic attitude throughout

History intimidating women so that they have failed to claim a

position of human dignity as liberated and independent beings

along with men. Since her adolescence, the time when in her

mind the idea of individualism was firmly rooted making her

believe that each individual was responsible for securing his

own, she had been of the view that if she being a woman had

accepted a secondary status in lifeworld as compared to that of

man, she would have been a mere parasite degrading her own

humanity. She was clearheaded that she was suffering from

those problems because she „happened to be a woman‟ and she

could control the situation if she was to attempt „qua

individual‟ (not qua woman) to resolve it. This justifies her

deviation from the nominalistic abstractness of the meaning of

womanhood to the existentialist notion of human being that

defines him or her as a „concrete‟ existent always a singular,

separate individual. Her interest in existentialism sets for her

the task of analysing the pivotal and ultimate problem of her

feminist discourse: „why is woman the Other?‟ Through that

analysis the point she attempts to make it is that woman‟s

existence is a human existence whose socio-historical progress

in the lifeworld has to be interpreted in its entirety (rather than

with reference to one particular dimension like biological,

psychoanalytical or economical etc.). And in this regard she

finds existentialism as the most appropriate framework, as it

affords us the transcendence from the one-dimensionality of

life leading us to the overall human situation which can be

explained on the ground of its „ontological substructure‟

defined by the nature of human being. Existentialism is for her

the only paradigm that can show the most transparent picture of

the human life, as it encompasses all categories of defining

human life that separately unsatisfactorily attempts to attain the

same task in the forms of the biological science, Freudianism

and Marxism. From the existentialist point of view, woman‟s

defining trait as an existent it is that when she was to accept her

biological fate to be a secondary contributor to the socio-

economic life she was to do that in bad faith, as she was in fact

an existent like man who could transcend that givenness of her



63

being the Other of man. In the face of this facticity of being in

bad faith she is very much capable of showing her aptitude as

an existent being free to engage in those life projects that could

bless her with new frontiers in her future life. It‟s all an attempt

to get rid of her bad faith as “woman” who could only be a

biological being-in-itself; instead she needs to realize that she is

a free individual being-for-itself that can improvise the life

projects to make her own what she is as an existent. Under the

yoke of her being a traditional consciousness shaped through

the effective history woman in bad faith accepts her role as a

weak, inferior and secondary being-in-itself (which is to say

that „one is not born, but rather becomes a woman‟ in the

process of effective history); but she always has the aptitude of

getting rid of her bad faith by transcending the facticity to

realize that she is a being-for-itself who can freely deliberate to

develop her own life projects.

The nomenclature of Simone de Beauvoir‟s philosophy is

defined by her attempt to address lopsidedly the question of

woman as the perpetual other in comparison with man in the

perspective of Sartre‟s phenomenological existentialism. One

may properly term her philosophy as phenomenological

existentialist feminism: feminism as it pivots around the

question of woman and phenomenological existentialism as this

pivoting takes its place mainly in relation to the composite

perspective of phenomenology and existentialism.

1. Life-Experience and the Philosophical Meanings:

Phenomenology, Existentialism and Marxism

Feminism, existentialism and phenomenology all forms of her

thought emerge from her life-experiences, and so it becomes an

essential trait of her philosophy that it is rooted in her life-

practice rather than intertextual reading. In the third volume of

her autobiography, Force of Circumstance, Beauvoir confesses

that even until the postwar scenario of her life in France she


64

„had no philosophical ambition.‟ It is the influence of Sartre‟s

specifically of Being and Nothingness that she gave care to

developing her philosophical insight through her mutual life-

praxis with Sartre. Although she does not deny her own

influences upon him what she received inversely from him was

so stronger and deeper that whatever she perceived about the

world with all of its „problems‟ and „their subtlety‟ was through

his presence with her. And this impact of her life-experience

with Sartre is so forceful that she directed herself to talking

about that phase of her life which was mutually practiced by

her and Sartre as such a „realm‟ that must not be taken as of

theirs mutually but only of Sartre‟s. She confesses:

“[Sartre] found himself committed to action in a much more radical

way than myself. We always discussed his attitudes together, and

sometimes I influenced him. But it was through him that these

problems, in all their urgency and all their subtlety, presented

themselves to me. In this realm, I must talk about him in order to

talk about us.”1

She recalls her memories about their youth when they found

themselves anarchists and so felt themselves close to the

Communist version of „negativism.‟ It seems that it was their

youthful romantic longing to Communism rather than a serious

thought out philosophical instance, as she explicitly clarifies

that they mutually „wanted the defeat of capitalism, but not the

accession of a socialist society‟ which would have possibly

„deprived‟ them of their „liberty.‟2 This clarification also

reflects that they were more strongly committed to

existentialism rather than Marxism, as they were unable to

sacrifice their individual freedom for the expected economic

betterment of their collective lifeworld. In support of their

mutual adherence to the existentialist meaning of individual

freedom against their abhorrence to the Marxist meanings of

the collective economic betterment, she cites from Sartre‟s

notebook, the entry on 14 September 1939:

“I am now cured of socialism, if I needed to be cured of it.”3

Beauvoir interprets this socialism-liberty contradiction of their

thought referring to their existentialist commitment to



65

experiencing authenticity of moral life. Under the dictates of

circumstances in postwar France they were to become face to

face with problems of poverty, injustice and deprivation which

determined them to be against capitalistic structure of their

social order that might be further suppressing for them. Out of

this fear of economic insecurity and social injustice they found

Marxist version of socialism to be an urgent solution of those

problems.4 But this urgency of finding solution might damage

the continuity of the social order to which they traditionally

belonged and in the nexus of which they wished to prosper as

creative writers for which the value of liberty was a

prerequisite. Liberty and socialism were for them like two

horns of a dilemma, and they found themselves hanging

between the illusions of the former and the deceptions of the

latter. At that point the shield of protection from this forceful

attack of these two horns came from the existentialist ethics –

„the morality of authenticity.‟ The circumstances of life force

one to submit to the facticities without leaving any room for

transcendence; but from the existentialist point of view one‟s

freedom makes every action a project of salvaging whatever

problems one is facing in life situations. They were not ready to

be living with the „absolute‟ meanings of faciticity – whether

socialistic or capitalistic rather they were interested in the

„transitory‟ spheres of life-experience wherein they „had to

renounce being and resolve to do.‟5 Being existentialists they

rebelled against „bourgeois humanism‟ characterized by the

reverence of a specific human nature that determines every act

of man. Instead of this essentialist approach towards human life

and act they appealed to the existentialist creativity of human

action based upon man‟s being condemned to be free. Out of

this freedom man does not only accept the given situation

subjectively, but he modifies the situation objectively „by

constructing a future in accord with his aspirations.‟ In this

regard the phenomenological intuition would be heuristically

significant, as to it everything in the lifeworld is immediately

shown as it exists in itself and so an aspirant soul can constitute

its own lifeworld freely. But still there is a difference between


66

phenomenology and existentialism as regards how the

subjective consciousness relates to the objective world.

Phenomenology defines consciousness as consciousness of

something, and when it does so it takes the full presence of the

world as noema being a correlate of noesis – immanently the

active pole of the transcendental subjectivity. That is to say, it

is the pure consciousness or the transcendental subjectivity that

constitutes the world immanently within itself in the paradigm

of the noema-noesis correlates which Husserl terms as the

structure of intentionality. As compared to phenomenology the

case of existentialism regarding the consciousness-world

relationship is a little different. For Sartre, consciousness is

similarly defined as consciousness of something but

consciousness does not act in the field of fantasy rather within

the realm of facticity. This factual consciousness receives

impressions as subjective plenitude through perception of the

things in the external world. And in doing so this factual

subjectivity that cannot transcend itself to posit the world,

rather it negates itself for the assertion that the world exists

concretely as being-in-itself. Out of this assertion about the

concrete world as being-in-itself what consciousness realizes

about itself is that it is always of phenomenal world and

without this phenomenon consciousness is only a void or an

emptiness whereby consciousness implies in its being a non-

conscious being „the nature of which is to be conscious of the

nothingness of its being.‟6 This experience of nihilism becomes

original of existentialist conception of creative freedom that

guarantees authenticity of one‟s moral life. Sartre and Beauvoir

share the notion of freedom not as autonomy of thinking or

doing with certain a priori meanings rather the creative

freedom – freedom as will to act ex nihilo. This affords an

absolute guarantee to experiencing the existentialist

authenticity of one‟s moral life. How in their youth Sartre and

Beauvoir were to experience it she describes:

“We had no external limitations, no overriding authority, no

imposed pattern of existence. We created our own links with the

world, and freedom was the very essence of our existence. In our

everyday lives we gave it scope by means of an activity which

assumed considerable importance for us – private fantasies…We

embraced this pursuit all the more zealously since we were both



67

active people by nature, and for the moment living a life of

idleness. The comedies, parodies, or fables which we made up had

a very specific object: they stopped us from taking ourselves too

seriously. Seriousness as such we rejected no less vigorously than

Nietzsche did, and for much the same reason: our jokes lightened

the world about us by projecting it into the realm of imagination,

thus enabling us to keep it at arm‟s length.”7

But from the ethical point of view one should not take this

existentialist practice of life as merely nihilistic though this

paragraph may reflect such meanings. Sartre and Beauvoir

were accused of being quietists or nihilists but they refused to

accept such labeling. Beauvoir clarifies that instead of „being a

quietism or nihilism, Existentialism‟ was to define man in

terms of action. Although it condemned man „to anxiety it did

so only insofar as it obliged him to accept responsibilities. The

hope it denied him was the idle reliance on anything other than

himself; it was an appeal to man‟s will.‟8 An existentialist does

not act in accord with moral principles but in the light of ends.

Beauvoir while recalling her memories when she started

publishing as a writer and Sartre was contributing to the cinema

and the theatre explains this trait of existentialist ethics. She

justifies that she and Sartre had always pooled their earnings,

and so she was not obliged to bother about her daily expenses.

This act of her seems to be against her feminist orientation, as

she being a feminist advises women to be independent of their

male cohabiters and that independence begins with economic

freedom. She explained this attitude appealing to existentialist

meanings of morality. She had taken a leave of absence from

the University in order that she could focus her reading and

writing. She could assure her economic autonomy „since if the

need arose‟ she could always get back to her teaching position

in the University. To her it seemed „stupid and even criminal‟

that in order to prove her economic freedom she would

sacrifice her precious time that she was spending in her creative

work. So in that sense her act might be in aberrance with the

principles of feminism but it was in accord with the

existentialist commitment with the ends of act that motivate her

for that action. Being a writer she found creative writing as a


68

„demanding task‟ that motivated her to do plenty of things and

she could not afford to spend her time in making money.

Thereby she guaranteed her „moral autonomy‟ in existentialist

sense; „in the solitude of risks taken, of decisions to be made,‟

she made her freedom more real than by accommodating

herself to „any money making routine.‟ For her, her reading and

writing were a genuine satisfaction, and as such they freed her

„from the necessity to affirm‟ herself in any other way.9 Being

authors and thinkers Sartre and Beauvoir deeply related their

consciousness to life-experience, and that phenomenological

trait of their intellectual orientation was so significant for them

that at times they found themselves ready to repudiate the label

of existentialism for the sake of their affinity with life-

experience. When Beauvoir published her second novel, Blood

of Others it was an instant success. Critics labeled it an

„Existentialist novel‟ which was not astonishing, as an affixing

of such a label on works of Beauvoir‟s or of Sartre‟s was more

than obvious. But surprisingly Sartre was to refuse out of

irritation to allow Gabriel Marcel to label him with the

adjective – existentialist during a discussion which the Cerf

publishing house was to organize for Beauvoir‟s novel. Sartre

said abhorrently and Beauvoir shared his irritation: „My

philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don‟t even know

what Existentialism is.‟ Beauvoir furthered this abhorrence by

adding that she had written that novel long before she had come

across with the term – Existentialism. She explained that for

that novel her inspirations came from her own „experience, not

from a system‟10

whether philosophical or social.

In the face of their mutual irritation and protest against the

epithet – Existentialists – which people were using for them, it

became a readymade label available to be put on everything

came from their mouths or their pens. After Beauvoir‟s novel

during the course of a few months Sartre published The Age of

Reason and The Reprieve, and gave a lecture – Is

Existentialism a Humanism? Beauvoir also gave lectures on her

novel and on metaphysics as well as her play – Les Bouches

inutiles opened for public, and simultaneously the first few

numbers of Les Temps Modernes11

also appeared. And so they

caused a sudden uproar in cultural and literary circles of



69

France. They both were pushed out into the limelight: Sartre

was vehemently flung into „the arena of celebrity‟ while

Beauvoir was identified as an „associate‟ of his. The

newspapers and the magazines discussed their works and

thoughts and there appeared gossips about their life and

particularly about their cohabitation everywhere. The paparazzi

started to take their candid shots intrusively and the strangers

rushed up to talk to them. They were so much popular that

when once Sartre was invited to give a lecture, so many people

gathered at the place that they all could not enter the lecture

hall, and there was that much rush that some women fainted.

This cultural uproar created by their philosophy and literature is

what Beauvoir negatively terms as an „Existentialist

offensive.‟12

Beauvoir analyzes how Sartre suddenly turned out

to be an existentialist hero in the post World War II France and

why he was welcomed as a new ideologist by not only the

literary people but by the public and not in only France but the

whole world. According to her, the social scenario of the post

World War II France happened to be in favour of Sartre‟s

philosophy, as there was a „remarkable‟ symmetry between

what the public wanted and what Sartre was offering to them.

The French middle class, which was the main addressee of

Sartre‟s works, had lost its faith in „peace‟ and „progress‟ and

they felt tiresome due to the permanent givenness of

„unchanging essences.‟ They needed an ideology which could

guide them to surging up these problems without denouncing

the traditional meanings they adhered to. Sartre‟s

Existentialism was striving to establish a harmony between the

facticity of life and what was morally required in order to

transcend the unwanted elements of factual life. Striving for the

compatibility between the historicity of life and morality,

Existentialism authorized the people „to accept their transitory

condition without renouncing a certain absolute, to face horror

and absurdity while still retaining their human dignity, to

preserve their individuality.‟13

The people thought that through

the Existentialist heuristics they could educate themselves how

to surge up their problems and that surging up seemed to be


70

closed to something they dreamed of. But it might be their bad

faith under the yoke of which they thought so, as according to

Beauvoir Sartre‟s Existentialism did not offer such heuristics.

She saw an „ambiguity‟ between what the new ideological

recipe was offering and what the people „were starved for.‟ She

found an element of intellectual seduction in that offer, as the

world he was creating in his novels or presenting in his

philosophical writings afforded certain space in the nexus of

which man being an individual had to maintain a particular

level of morality. They could not accept the Existentialist

morality, as it was altogether different from the morality they

were practicing in their facticity; and so they rejected Sartre‟s

offer and „they accused him of sordid realism, of

„miserabilism‟.‟ The moral choice Sartre offered them was

grounded upon the freedom that implied tedious responsibilities

that might turn „against their institutions‟ and „mores‟; it could

ruin that lifeworld which they found secure in moral terms. One

more element in Sartre‟s philosophy which might be

threatening to the freedom they were practicing as bourgeois

was Marxist dialectic; they were dubious about whether it was

safe to be marching along the Communists into the new phase

of History for which Sartre was inviting them. Beauvoir clearly

understood the dubiousness of attitude of those came to Sartre

for ideological guidance and their half-hearted attachment with

Existentialism and Sartre‟s apparent influence that could not be

penetrated into that culture. She judges:

“In Sartre, the bourgeois recognized themselves without consenting

to the self-transcendence he exemplified; he was speaking their

language, and using it to tell them things they did want to hear.

They came to him, and came back to him, because he was asking

the questions that they were asking themselves; they ran because

his answers shocked them.”14

Sartre found himself „a celebrity and a scandal‟ simultaneously,

and this simultaneity loaded with a huge fame was absolutely

unexpected for him and it did not in any way match with what

he being a writer had ever dreamed of. Beauvoir reports about

Sartre that he considered literature divine, sacred and eternal,

and this eternity lied in its being alien and misunderstood in its

facticity and in its transcendence of the epoch in which it was



71

created to be properly understood and admired in the future.

Sartre imaginatively aligned himself with great genii like

Baudelaire, Stendhal or Kafka whose works did not reach more

than a very small group of admirers in their lifetime; but the

meanings they created were to transcend that facticity to

become eternal in their impact when in the coming generations

they found a hugely wider audience to appreciate them. Sartre‟s

becoming a scandalous celebrity in a younger age robbed him

of that fateful solitude necessarily belonged to a genius and

which had to be transcended by the future generations

interpreting the meanings with the due attention. This loss of

eternity of meanings for Sartre, estimates Beauvoir, „was truly

the death of God, who up till then had survived under the mask

of words.‟15

This was completely catastrophic for Sartre but for

Beauvoir while in this regard she compared herself with him it

was not so horrible, as she had never believed in the divinity or

eternity of literature. She explained that for her „God had died‟

when she was fourteen and then nothing (even literature) „had

replaced him.‟ She appeared to be more intense existentialist

than Sartre, as she experienced the meaning of the death of God

in her teens while Sartre had to be matured enough to

experience the same. Besides this for Sartre the absolute or the

sacred was reincarnated in the form of literature whereas for

Beauvoir „the absolute existed only in the negative, like a

horizon forever lost in view.‟ She confesses that she had a

fantasy of becoming a legend like Emily Bronte or Gorge

Elliot, but this fantasy was absolutely mundane without even

any traces of divinity, as she was „firmly convinced‟ that once

she died nothing would exist to embrace such fantasies. She

wished to succeed as a writer in her lifetime, she „wanted to be

widely read,‟ „to be esteemed, to be loved,‟ as she believed that

once she closed her eyes all meanings would perish with the

age she lived in.16

If seen from existentialist point of view,

Beauvoir appeared to be more contented both as a writer and as

a social being; and she was less deceived than Sartre „by the

illusion of being,‟ for she „had paid the price of this

renunciation during‟ her adolescence. Being a true existentialist


72

she was more able than he to enjoy „the transitory,‟ „the

immediate‟ – like „the pleasures of the body, the feel of the

weather, walks, friendships, gossips, learning, seeing.‟ Sartre

was saturated by his fame as a scandalous celebrity and by his

success as a writer, but she was able to be everlastingly

unsaturated by success and she could infinitely enlarge the

horizon of her hopes as an ever prosperous writer. She

explicitly declared that she might be „satisfied‟ as a creative

writer but never „satiated.‟17

That was the genuine form of

existentialist freedom or liberation that one could experience

with that much richness and depth in such explicit terms.

For them the most suitable practical social framework for

exercising such a form of freedom was democracy to which

they felt adherence, but the complementary part of that social

structure was socialism to which they hitherto felt abhorrence

due to their fear of being lost in the collectivity having deprived

of their individuality. But in any case they hitherto saw both

democracy and socialism as humanity‟s only chance of giving

rise to social justice and as a necessary condition of their own

fulfillment.

In spite of this intellectual confusion of identifying themselves

as half Marxist and half petite bourgeoisie, both Sartre and

Beauvoir convincingly found certain notions of

phenomenology and existentialism as absolutely meaningful for

human lifeworld like „the concepts of negativity, of interiority,

of existence and of freedom elaborated in Being and

Nothingness.‟ Like socialist-democrat they knew the

significance of the idea of praxis in human life, but they were

not ready to abandon their commitment with the existentialist

ethics or the morality of authenticity in life. This

phenomenological-existentialist meaningfulness primordially

defined the mold of their existence on the ground of which they

later chose to be Marxist or petite bourgeoisie or both

simultaneously. They tore the element of „humanism from the

clutches of the bourgeoisie‟ and sincerely tried to make it a

value for the Marxists. In Beauvoir‟s words, it was an attempt

„to bridge the gap between the intellectual petite bourgeoisie

and the Communist intellectuals.‟18



73

2. Life-Experience and the Philosophical Meanings:

Feminism19

As I mentioned above of Beauvoir‟s belief that her version of

phenomenological existentialism is not a matter of intertextual

study rather of reflection on experience while interacting with

friends, people, ideas etc. in one‟s lifeworld; in her case the

most important life-experience in this respect is her life-long

companionship with Sartre. Being a genuine phenomenologist

she is convinced with the view that the philosophical meanings

whatsoever one comes across with should not be separated

from one‟s life-experience. Like phenomenology,

existentialism and Marxism her notion of feminism can also be

traced back in the nexus of her relationship with Sartre. The

pivotal theme of Beauvoir‟s magnum opus, Le Deuxième Sexe

(The Second Sex) is the idea that women in relation to men

have placed secondarily in the lifeworld since the ancient times

and further that this secondary position of women in the social

order is imposed by the force of the patriarchal atmosphere

rather than the feminine characteristics. She argues that this

situation is a result of men‟s chauvinistic attitude throughout

History intimidating women so that they have failed to claim a

position of human dignity as liberated and independent beings

along with men. Although she wrote that book when she was a

mature woman (the year of publication was 1949) the idea had

been there in her mind since she was in her early twenties.

In The Prime of Life, she recalls her memories of those days

when she was struggling to become a writer and she had to

begin her career as an independent individual not only socially

and economically but intellectually as well. She quarreled with

her childhood friend, Herbaud who accused her of having

betrayed that notion of „individualism‟ which had previously

won her his esteem; and he then did not only condemn her for

that betrayal but also broke off their childhood friendship. In

the mean Sartre was also to show his anxiety that he felt about


74

her. He told her that she not only „used to be full of little ideas‟

which was jeopardizing for her as a budding writer; he also

warned her that she under the yoke of that orientation might

become a „female introvert‟ possibly leading her to turning into

„a mere housewife‟ rather than a creative writer. Reacting to

that anxious feeling of Sartre‟s and accusation of Herbaud‟s,

she confesses that she was not „a militant feminist,‟ as she „had

no theories concerning the rights and duties of women.‟ As

during her adolescence she „had refused to be labeled “a

child,”‟ so then during her youth she did not think of herself „as

“a woman.” She explains that she had been reluctant to have

„the notion of salvation‟ in her mind since it lost „the belief in

God‟ while she was only fourteen. This was the time when in

her mind the idea of individualism was firmly rooted making

her believe that „each individual was responsible for securing

his own.‟ She furthers that being a woman if she had accepted

„a secondary status‟ in lifeworld as compared to that of man,

she would have been a mere parasite degrading her own

humanity. She was clearheaded that she was suffering from

those problems because she „happened to be a woman‟ and she

could control the situation if she was to attempt „qua

individual‟ (not qua woman) to resolve it.20

The phrase „qua individual‟ needs here to be explained further

referring to Beauvoir‟s theorizing concerning feminism. This

phrase may afford some space to be occupied by the meaning

of „nominalism‟ which she renounces, for she finds it

disproportionate regarding her notion of feminism lopsidedly

defined by existentialist phenomenology. In The Second Sex,

she begins her feministic theorizing by putting to criticism

certain nominalistic remarks by Dorothy parker: “I cannot be

just to books which treat of woman as woman….My idea is that

all of us, men as well as women, should be regarded as human

beings.” According to Beauvoir, it is an „inadequate doctrine,‟

as the antifeminists can easily falsify it by showing that

„women simply are not men.‟ It is more than evident that

„humanity is divided into two classes of individuals whose

clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, gaits, interests, and occupations

are manifestly different‟ and this truth demonstrates itself to

one in one‟s everydayness without investing one‟s intellect.



75

Woman‟s repudiating her eternal femininity is to Beauvoir like

a Jew‟s denying his Jewishness or a Negro‟s denying his

Negritude that cannot liberate a woman or a Jew or Negro to

surge up, rather an escape from reality. So women‟s being

defiant regarding womanhood reflects that their sense of

perpetual femininity is haunting to them and they want to get

rid of it; and this to Beauvoir is in no way an appropriate

attitude of women. In spite of this nominalistic abstractness she

directs herself to the existentialistic clear-headedness that in the

facticity every human being finds himself or herself a

„concrete‟ existent „always a singular, separate individual.‟

Being a true existentialist Beauvoir first define the problem of

feminism in the nexus of facticity whereby she expounds how

woman being a For-itself is necessarily related to the In-itself –

the world and its past; then she attempts to afford a morality of

freedom by virtue of which an autonomous subject can

transcend the given projecting her existence beyond the

facticity. Drawing upon Lévinas‟s idea of Otherness,21

Beauvoir defines feminine as the Other of the masculine. The

humanity is compartmentalized in the masculine, the male and

the feminine, the female; and the former being the self-

sufficient subject, the autonomous and the essential defines the

latter as the object, the incidental and the inessential – the

Other. This meaning of the Otherness of woman‟s being

contains certain connotations of the secondariness, the

inferiority and the humility, and so the meaningfulness of the

Otherness absolutely remains one-sided in its effect which is to

say that it is only woman that is the Other of man not the vice

versa. The negligence of the element of relativity that is

obvious in one‟s considering somebody as an Other contributes

to the humility of the feminine, as for Beauvoir „the other

consciousness, the other ego, sets up a reciprocal claim.‟ For

every native a foreigner is a stranger, an Other, but when a

native is to travel abroad he finds that the natives of the country

he is traveling consider him a stranger, a foreigner, an Other;

and so a native‟s experience of being regarded as an Other by


76

the Others forces him to realize the reciprocity of the meaning

of Otherness. Beauvoir tempts to let women be aware of their

collective deprivation of the sensibility of this reciprocity in the

meaning of Otherness; this sensibility is the key to understand

that it is the chauvinism and the sovereignty of the masculine

that he absolutely defines himself as the One, the subject, the

essential forcing the feminine to submit to be the Other, the

object, the inessential. Beauvoir‟s feminism tasks to convince

women to renounce this submissive attitude to be the Other, the

object, the inessential and to attempt to regain the status of

being the One, the subject, the essential.

„Whence comes this submission‟ of the feminine? While

seeking the answer to this question, Beauvoir compares women

as a class of individuals with other such classes of the

submissive individuals exemplified in the nexus of History and

culture. Such classes include the American Negroes, the Jews,

the Proletarians and the Colonized nations suppressed to be the

Other by the American racist Whites, the Nazis, the Bourgeois

and the Imperialists respectively. But the case of women is the

worst among all. The Negroes said “We” as the subject, the

One, the essential when they struggled for their constitutional

rights in America. The Jews said “We” while convincing the

whole world that they were subject to the extreme suppression

by the Nazis and so they translated the word Nazi into an

abusive term. The Proletarians said “We” while revolutionizing

certain nations by eliminating the bourgeois regimes. And the

Colonized nations said “We” when they finally dragged the

Imperialist forces out of their homelands. „But women do not

say „We,” complains Beauvoir, „men say “women,” and

women use the same word [as a term of objectification] in

referring to themselves.‟ By not saying “We” women show that

they are unable to „authentically assume a subjective attitude.‟

They do not will to assert in order to regain the status of the

One, the essential, the subject rather they are satisfied with

gaining only what men are willing to grant; „they have taken

nothing, they have only received‟ from men. „The reason of

this,‟ explains Beauvoir,



77

“is that women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into

a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They

have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no

such solidarity of work and interest as that of the Proletariat. They

are not even promiscuously herded together in the way that creates

community feeling among the American Negroes, the ghetto Jews,

the workers of Saint-Danis, or the factory hands of Renault. They

live dispersed among the males, attached through residence,

housework, economic condition, and the social standing to certain

men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other

women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with

men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white,

their allegiance is to white men, not to Negro women. The

proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a

sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of getting sole

possession of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly

Jewish or black; but women cannot even dream of exterminating

the males.”

Why women, as compared to the Negroes, the Jews, or the

proletarians, are unable to unite themselves against their

oppressors, men. The nature of bond, according to Beauvoir,

that unites women to men is unique and so transcending all

other bonds between the oppressed and the oppressors. The

women-men sexual divide is not an historical event, but rather

„a biological fact.‟ The masculine and the feminine „stand

opposed within a primordial Mitsein,‟ and the latter is unable to

break with it. The man-woman espousing is the fundamental

institutional act that webs the whole lifeworld as a unit and then

keep it so intact; thereby splitting a social order „along the line

of sex is impossible.‟ This natural mutuality of man and woman

genuinely defines the mutual Otherness between them that both

are the One and the Other simultaneously „in a totality of which

the two components are necessary to one another.‟ Out of this

reciprocity women should have asserted to be a free individual

– the one, the subject, the essential, but men distorting the

meaning of man-woman mutuality parenthesized them as the

object of fulfilling their sexual need and the desire of offspring.

So women remain failure in safeguarding their social


78

emancipation through man‟s dependence on them rather that

dependence makes the male define the female as an object of

satisfaction whose readiness for the coupling is determined not

by her but by the male appetite. As a result of this fruitlessness

of the reciprocity of the Otherness, „the two sexes have never

shared the world in equality.‟ The burden of this fruitlessness

or failure is not only on the male chauvinism but rather equally

on the female potentiality to act as an accomplice in the process

of parenthesizing herself as the Other. If women had raised her

voice against that suppression, they would have faced the loss

of „the material protection‟ provided by men. So in a bad faith

she is contented to be an inauthentic existent remaining

incapable of showing the moral urge of transcending that

facticity of being „the creature of another‟s will,‟ though she

may be frustrated to be a „passive, lost and ruined‟ self

„deprived of every value.‟ Thus, concludes Beauvoir, woman

has failed to lay claim to be the subject, the One preferring to

play the role of the object, the Other because of her being short

of „definite resources‟ that leads her to feeling contentment and

pleasure with „the necessary bond that ties her to man

regardless of reciprocity.‟

Beauvoir condemns in this regard the process of history and

tradition that has made woman deprive in absolute term of the

urge of transcending the state of the secondary being. It has

been the process of the millennia that men – „legislators,

priests, philosophers, writers and scientists‟ – have firmly been

struggling to establish that „the subordinate position of woman

is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.‟ The religions,

philosophies, sciences and arts all have been contributing to

this menace characterized by the unjustifiable male domination

and female subordination. The female consciousness as an

outcome of this traditional process is effected to be an historical

consciousness ascribed with the meanings of inferiority and

humility. But for Beauvoir all these meanings are prejudiced22

and biased attempting lopsidedly to convince woman to feel

contented with the stagnant and static life. The key to rejection

of this notion is the existentialist ethics – the view that

man/woman is condemned to be free and he/she has to play

his/her role in life by projecting freely his/herself through the



79

mode of transcendence. One may genuinely experience the real

meaning of freedom through a „continual reaching out toward

other liberties.‟ And if in that process of the projecting and

surging up of the for-itself there arises any „degradation of

existence‟ coming across with the in-itself and if so one finds

threat to one‟s freedom owing to an existential downfall that

„spells frustration and oppression,‟ then „it will be an absolute

evil.‟ In order to assert the authenticity of one‟s existence one

has to transcend the stagnation of the facticity by engaging

oneself in „freely chosen projects.‟ If one undertakes the

particular situation of woman as an individual in the

perspective of the existentialist ethics one may propose that she

has to transcend her stabilizing and static role as the Other, the

object, the inessential ascribed to her by men through history.

The transcendence is possible if she in good faith freely

engages herself in projecting life beyond these false meanings

attributed to her by men and that have overshadowed the real

meanings of her existence as the subject, the One, the essential.

Conclusion

Our argumentation shows validly that Beauvoir‟s existentialist

feminism is not a matter of the intertextual study rather of

reflection on experience while interacting with friends, people,

ideas etc. in her lifeworld; the most important life-experience in

this respect is her life-long companionship with Sartre. Being a

genuine phenomenologist she is convinced with the view that

the philosophical meanings whatsoever one comes across with

should not be separated from one‟s life-experience. We have

thus tried in this study to trace her feminism back in the nexus

of her relationship with Sartre. The pivotal theme of Beauvoir‟s

magnum opus, Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) is the idea

that women in relation to men have placed secondarily in the

lifeworld since the ancient times and further that this secondary

position of women in the social order is imposed by the force of

the patriarchal atmosphere rather than the feminine

characteristics.


80

This paper has construed a two-fold argument. First, it has

shown how Beauvoir construes her philosophical task in the

existentialist mold by incorporating phenomenology and

Marxism and then how she expounds the possibility of

expounding the main course of her feminist philosophy in the

nexus of her eclectic approach to these three philosophical

spheres.

Under the influence of Sartre, she directs herself in order to

grasp the meaning of femininity to the nexus of

phenomenology and existentialism. In the perspective of

existential phenomenology, the death makes man‟s life finite

but before that he projects life through time creating behind

him the infinite past and before him the unlimited future; and in

this perpetual progress of human species man and woman both

take part as correlatives and so this perpetuation of the species

does not necessitate sexual differentiation.

Notes

1 Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard

(Middlesex, Penguin, 1963), p. 12 2 Ibid.

3 Sartre did not totally abandon his commitments to Marxism though this

notebook entry reflects such meanings. Beauvoir on the same page clarifies

about their confusion regarding the meanings of socialism and liberty: “Yet

in ‟41, when [Sartre] was forming a Resistance group, the two words he

brought together for its baptism were: socialism and liberty. The war had

effected a decisive conversion.” See Ibid.

4 It reflects their old romance with Marxism and their perpetual detestation

for capitalism. Beauvoir in the second volume of her autobiography recalls

those memories of their youthful days when they were to dream of the

ruining of capitalism. She says: “We counted on events turning out

according to our wishes without any need for us to mix in them personally.

In this respect our attitude was characteristic of that general euphoria

affecting the French Left during the autumn of 1929. Peace seemed finally

assured: the expansion of the German Nazi party was a mere fringe

phenomenon, without any serious significance. It would not be long before

colonialism folded up: Gandhi‟s campaign in India and the Communist



81

agitation in French Indo-China were proof enough of that. Moreover the

whole capitalist world was, at that time, being shaken by a crisis of the

utmost gravity; and this encouraged the assumption that capitalism as such

had had its day. We felt that we were already living in that Golden Age

which for us constituted the secret truth of History and the revelation of

which remained History‟s final and exclusive objective.” See Simone de

Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green (New York, Paragon House,

1992), p. 18

5 Beauvoir explains their attitude referring to the influences they

experienced at that time through reading both Heidegger and Saint-Exupéry

who taught them the „meanings came into the world only by the activity of

man, practice superseded contemplation.‟ Op. Cit., Force of Circumstance,

p. 13

6 Op. Cit., Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 47

7 Op. Cit., The Prime of Life, p. 20

8 This clarification is not of Beauvoir‟s rather of Sartre‟s. Actually, certain

Marxists at that time were criticizing Sartre for being influenced by

Heidegger and so gone astray being a Marxist. Francis Ponge who ran

cultural section of Les Lettres françaises told Sartre and Beauvoir about a

huge number of articles against Sartre that he was receiving for publication.

When he published some of those articles, Sartre was to reply „with a Mise

au point (Definition of Terms).‟ This clarification is a part of that reply to

the Marxists. On this see Op. Cit., Force of Circumstance, p. 16

9 Ibid., p. 21

10 Ibid., pp.45-6. On another occasion Beauvoir expresses her unqualified

faith in life experience as the most important trait of the art of writing. She

said: “I want to write: I want to put down phrases on paper, to take elements

from my life and turn them into words.” She further clarifies her ambition as

an author more precisely: “I shall never be able to give myself to art

excepting as a means of protecting my life.” On this see Op. Cit., The Prime

of Life, p. 26 11

Beauvoir and Sartre mutually published this periodical as an organ of

existentialism. Its first number appeared in October 1945. The title of the

journal was inspired by the Chaplin film – Modern Times. The editorial


82

committee was comprised of Raymond Aron, Michel Leiris, Merleau-Ponty,

Albert Ollivier, Jean Paulhan, Sartre and Beauvoir. See Ibid., p. 22. This

magazine was to play the major role in making Existentialism a worldwide

movement in culture and literature; this new ideology of liberation and

individualism was projected by Sartre and Beauvoir right from the first

number of this periodical. While writing its preface he showed how that new

ideology would dwell „not only on responsibility in literature, but on the

concept of each man as a totality. By implication, not solely in France and

its citizens, but people everywhere were to be the concern of the new

existentialist periodical. This program [had] been carried out by the

magazine to such a degree that literature [had] never attained the importance

accorded to political, economic, and sociological matters, both in France and

abroad.‟ On this see Kenneth Cornall, Les Temps Modernes: Peep Sights

across the Atlantic, in Yale French Studies: Foray through Existentialism

(No. 16: Winter 1955), pp. 24-28

12

Ibid., p. 46 13

Ibid., p. 47 14

Ibid. 15

Ibid., p. 48

16

Ibid., p. 54 17

Ibid., p. 55 18

Actually Beauvoir cites from Sartre‟s work, Les Communistes at la paix

(1952). His exact words are: “Coming from the middle classes, we tried to

bridge the gap between the intellectual petite bourgeoisie and the

Communist intellectuals.” See Ibid., p. 15

19

In this part of the article, I shall take the “Introduction” to Simone de

Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), trans. H. M. Parshley (New

York, Vintage, 1989) as a reference and guide, submitting its principal

theses to my interpretation. I shall give the other references, if any,

accordingly.

20

Op. Cit., The Prime of Life, p. 54 21

Lévinas thinks that the feminine represents an absolute caricature of the

otherness (altérité) as the contrariness of the masculine, „this contrariness

being in no wise affected by any relation between it and its correlative and



83

thus remaining absolutely other. Sex is not a certain specific difference …

no more is the sexual difference a mere contradiction … Nor does this

difference lie in the duality of two complementary terms imply a pre-

existing whole … Otherness reaches its full flowering in the feminine, a

term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning.‟ See Op.

Cit., The Second Sex, n. 3 on p. xxii

22

Beauvoir‟s argument is in opposition to that of Gadamer‟s. The latter

while construing his hermeneutics of tradition, argues that the tradition is

not a dead past rather a living continuity, a flow of „effective-history‟ that

not only encompasses the past but also the relevant present. So the

functionality of human consciousness cannot in any way transcend the

process of history and tradition, on the contrary it is continued through the

very process. On Gadamer‟s theory of tradition see Hans-Georg Gadamer,

Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), trans. G. Barden and W. G.

(New York, Crossroad, 1975) specifically Part II

Documents

The Life-Experience and the Philosophical Meanings: Defining .... Natasha Research...Journal of Historical Studies Vol. II, No.I (January-June 2016) 61 The Life-Experience and the